Unions

As Facebook finds itself in the midst of another controversy, coming under fire from the left this time, it turns out a coalition attacking Facebook includes a prominent press union.

Facebook is in the midst of what Vox called a “liberal apology tour” after hiring an opposition research firm which sought to shed light on connections and funding of the Freedom From Facebook (FFF) coalition and liberal billionaire George Soros. The group’s goal is to pressure the Federal Trade Commission into breaking up Facebook and forcing it to spin off assets like Messenger and Instagram to reduce the company’s power.

Alex Griswold at the Washington Free Beacon reports that two scholars at the American Enterprise Institute studied newspaper coverage of last spring's teacher strikes and found that of the quotes included in the articles, 60 percent supported the strikes, 26 percent were neutral, and only 14 percent opposed the walkouts -- a tilt of more than four to one.

The New York Times will never forgive conservative Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker for taming his state's public unions and then surviving the vengeance of a union-funded recall election. It found another line of attack in Thursday’s Arts section: Book criticJennifer Szalai’s laudatory look at The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics by liberal author Dan Kaufman. Szalai idn’t mention that Kaufman, who has also contributed to the far-left Nation magazine, has written several passionate encomiums to Wisconsin unions for the paper.

It’s clear from MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes’s twitter feed, he was unhappy with the Supreme Court decision that limited the power of public sector unions.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of Mark Janus, a public employee who took his union to court, in the Janus v. AFSCME case. Janus claimed being required to pay fees amounted to “compelled speech” because public sector unions are inherently political. In a June 27, 2018, decision the court agreed that employees of public sector unions should not have to pay such “fair share” fees because it violates their First Amendment rights.

The establishment press, which never seems to miss a chance to highlight conflict among Republicans and conservatives, is ignoring a major dispute involving two of the left's most prominent organizations: The SEIU and Planned Parenthood. The union has tried to organize workers at the Rocky Mountains affiliate of the nation's largest abortion provider. Planned Parenthood is not pleased with the unionization effort, and has run to — get this — the Trump administration's National Labor Relations Board in an attempt to stop it. None of this is news at national establishment press outlets, or even at the local Denver Post.

Protests by workers and activists and, in some cases, violence by anarchists marked the far-left holiday May Day this year.

But most American news consumers would not have known that some London demonstrators carried communist flags and banners of brutal Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. They weren’t told that communists marched in Athens, Greece, or that anti-capitalist anarchists destroyed windows and threw Molotov cocktails in Paris.

At Slate.com on Friday, Felix Salmon called the Ford Motor Company "heartless" for its plans to phase out most of its car models, because "The losers, of course, will be the workers." Saturday, Ford responded that no jobs will be lost at its Chicago Assembly plant in converting it to light truck production. Salmon posted that response at the end of his column, but in three days he and Slate haven't changed their "heartless" — and baseless — assessment.

Looking at the grief Starbucks has received for problems with two patrons at a Philadelphia store, one might ask why current Executive Chairman and former CEO Howard Schultz didn't buy some media protection by purchasing a major newspaper. Fellow Seattle-area resident and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos did that with the Washington Post in 2013. Amazon's alleged engagement in 21st-century sweatshop practices and union-busting has gone virtually unnoticed in the establishment press since Bezos bought the Post.

After a brief interlude, the New York Times is getting label-happy again, this time in its Supreme Court coverage. Beat reporter Adam Liptak on Tuesday covered the arguments in an important case involving free speech and government unions -- whether forcing workers to support public unions violates their First Amendment rights -- in “Newest Justice, Seen as Key Vote, Is Silent During Arguments on Unions.”

Friday, Fox Business's Maria Bartiromo interviewed Philip Jennings, General Secretary of the UNI Global Union, as he took a break from supposedly helping the downtrodden by attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Jennings whined that unions can't organize in America because of government and employer obstruction, and brought the host to a boil when he falsely claimed that 62 percent of the benefits of December's tax-cut legislation go to the top 1 percent.

It takes a special talent to spin news which is unquestionably positive into something negative. But Christopher Rugaber and Josh Boak at the Associated Press were up to the task in a Wednesday afternoon report on bonuses, pay raises, and other benefits which now have been showered on well over 2 million American workers since the December passage of federal tax cuts.

USA Today reporter Paul Davidson apparently doesn't understand that policies which help workers get hired and keep their jobs are more "worker-friendly" than those designed to line trial lawyers' pockets and help labor unions coerce companies into dealing with them. At least twice this year, Davidson, in his headlines and his content, has characterized moves by the federal government's National Labor Relations Board which have restored predictable economic order as "overturning" Obama-era regulations which were supposedly "worker-friendly," but really weren't.

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